UC San Diego faculty, staff and students now have access to BrowZine. It’s a service that allows you to browse, organize, read and keep up with your favorite scholarly journals licensed by UC San Diego, either on your desktop/laptop via their website, or through an app on your mobile device. BrowZine covers arts, humanities, social science, engineering and science journals from hundreds of commercial, society, and university press publishers. We have licensed it through June 2018, at which point we will decide whether or not to continue licensing, based on usage, available funding, and user feedback.

“Black Lives Matter is an ideological and political intervention in a world where Black lives are systematically and intentionally targeted for demise.
It is an affirmation of Black folks’ contributions to this society, our humanity, and our resilience in the face of deadly oppression.”
– Alicia Garza

#BlackLivesMatter Book Display
Geisel Library, main floor, west wing
through August 19, 2016

#PulseOrlandoSyllabus Book Display
Geisel Library, main floor, west wing
through July 29, 2016

To gain some understanding from events like the mass shooting in Orlando, librarians and educators—ready to connect information to those who need it— have collectively built the #PulseOrlandoSyllabus(collocated with #OrlandoSyllabus).

Member libraries of the Western Regional Storage Trust (WEST)— which includes the UC San Diego Library and other UC libraries—have reached a major milestone in creating a shared print library collection for the ages, successfully archiving half a million volumes.

Academic and research libraries participating in the Trust will celebrate the 500,000th volume archived at a members meeting held at the American Library Association’s annual conference in June 2016.

The five hundred thousandth volume is an issue of the Forum Journal a publication of the National Trust for Historic Preservation (Washington, D.C.). The print archive is held by Arizona State University Libraries and includes volumes contributed by several libraries in the region. Read more…

Do you use social media posts as a data source? The Library is piloting (through September 30, 2017) a subscription to Crimson Hexagon, a web-based library of social media posts (updated in real-time) and social media analysis software platform. Posts can be searched using keywords and then either downloaded for off-line analysis with third party tools or analyzed using Crimson Hexagon’s data visualizations.

Data sources include:

Twitter: Full Twitter Firehose (all public tweets) through a direct partnership with Twitter beginning July 2010. Twitter content via the Gardenhose from July 2009.

Tumblr: Full Tumblr Firehose through a direct partnership with Tumblr beginning January 2015.

Google Plus

Blogs, for example blogspot.com.

Forums, for example reddit.com and yahoo.com.

Facebook

Instagram Hashtags

Reviews: Product-based reviews from consumer sites such as tripadvisor.com and amazon.com.

Weibo*: As of September 1, 2015, currently unavailable due to the Chinese Government has forcing SINA to suspend all data leaving China through any and all data delivery vehicles pending an official policy regarding foreign use.

UC San Diego authors in the market for a publisher should consider Luminos, the Open Access (OA) publishing program for scholarly monographs from UC Press. Luminos titles go through the same rigorous selection and peer review processes as all other UC press books and are published in both digital and traditional formats. The digital editions of all Luminos-published titles are available free of charge to anyone in the world, which makes them widely accessible to readers regardless of their home institution’s library budget and ideal for assigned course readings in the age of prohibitively high textbook prices. The traditional print copies are available for purchase, review copies, and other publicity such as conference booths. Both versions will be identical in content and layout, but digital editions can also include live links and interactive multimedia such as audio, video, or maps.

In the OA model, publishing costs are shifted from the final product’s readers to the content creators, in this case: the author and UC Press. Authors are not paid royalties, as any revenue from print sales helps offset the costs of the OA digital editions. UC Press calculates the cost of OA monograph publishing at approximately $15,000; the author’s contribution for University of California faculty, books based on UC dissertations, and books in series where the editor is UC faculty is $5,000.

To support this venture, UC San Diego Library will cover the (full) author fee of $5000 for UC San Diego authors’ accepted books. For more information, contact Annelise Sklar (asklar@ucsd.edu), the Social Sciences Collection Coordinator.

San Diego Welcomes the World, an exhibition of materials from the Library’s Special Collections & Archives, celebrates the 100th anniversary of the 1915 Panama-California Exposition, which commemorated the opening of the Panama Canal, and launched the City as an international venue. The construction of the Panama Canal was an immense engineering feat, dramatically cutting the distance and cost of international shipping by opening a passage between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. It also proved to be an excellent opportunity for enhancing San Diego’s profile–as it would become the first port north of the Panama Canal on the West Coast of the United States. The event also provided San Diego leaders with the impetus for transforming Balboa Park from an undeveloped, arid property, into a lush and distinctly Spanish paradise. The 1915 Exposition led to both the greening of Balboa Park as well as the creation of the park’s cultural institutions and stunning Spanish Revival architecture.

The exhibition, which is on display on the main floor in Geisel Library (2nd floor, West Wing) until July 5, 2015, includes images of some of the few permanent structures designed for the fair, including the California Tower and dome, the Cabrillo Bridge, and the Spreckels Organ Pavilion. Other items in the exhibit include souvenir books and postcards, newspaper articles, sheet music, a special student admittance pass, maps of the Canal, and more.

Join us for this “virtual reading” that will feature newly digitized recordings from the large archive of poetry readings created by poet and translator Paul Blackburn [1926-1971]. Blackburn played an important role in the New York poetry community, and his archive has been described as “the most comprehensive oral history of the New York poetry scene between the late 1950s and 1970.”

Thursday, May 7
4:00 – 6:00 p.m.
Seuss Room, Geisel Library

The readings that Blackburn recorded are now being digitized by the UC San Diego Library. They were indexed soon after their acquisition in 1973 by UC San Diego Literature Professor Michael Davidson, who had recently been hired as the first curator of the Archive for New Poetry and who was instrumental in acquiring the final segment of Blackburn’s papers. During his tenure as curator, he built the Archive for New Poetry into one of the world’s preeminent collections documenting experimental post-WW II poetry and has continued to promote it and to advise the Library on its subsequent development. The event will honor Davidson’s many contributions to the Library over the past 40 years. An exhibit of his own works and manuscripts will be on display at the reception following the reading. This event is free and open to the public.

If you like books, libraries, architecture, and science fiction, you might want to sign up for an all-day tour Friday, April 24, with UC San Diego’s University Librarian, Brian Schottlaender, to visit some of the Inland Empire’s most spectacular libraries.

The tour will start at the A.K. Smiley Public Library in Redlands, an architectural gem and a designated historic landmark which opened in 1898. Participants will get a custom tour by Library director Don McCue and will learn about the Smiley’s rare and valuable materials from Special Collections director, Nathan Gonzales. This stop will include a visit to the Lincoln Memorial Shrine just next door.

Rivera Library UC Riverside

From Redlands, the group will head to Riverside for an informal lunch at the amazing Mission Inn with Steve Mandeville-Gamble, UC Riverside’s university librarian. After lunch, participants will have time to explore the stunning and unusual Mission Inn before departing for the UC Riverside campus, and a tour of UC Riverside’s Special Collections & Archives. At UCR, library staff will share highlights of the collection, including the Library’s Eaton Collection of Science Fiction & Fantasy, the largest publicly-accessible collection of science fiction, fantasy, horror, and utopian literature in the world.
The all-day excursion will begin with an 8:30 a.m. departure by coach from the Supercomputer Center on the UC San Diego campus, and will return at approximately 6 p.m. The fee to attend is $80 per person, which includes transportation, lunch, snacks, and gratuity. Seating is limited to 25 people!

To register, please contact Christina Continelli no later than Friday, April 17, 2015
at 858-534-1183, or ccontinelli@ucsd.edu.

Germans in the Pacific World, an exhibition of materials from the Library’s Special Collections & Archives, traces the trajectories of German explorers, missionaries, entrepreneurs, and others, who ventured into the Pacific to explore that ocean’s vast landmasses and numerous islands. The exhibit, which is on display in Geisel Library thru the end of spring quarter, depicts the myriad ways the German presence shaped the region’s history, and led to the creation of newly documented knowledge about the peoples, geography, fauna, and flora in and around the Pacific.

Germans in the Pacific World was curated by Professor Ulrike Strasser and graduate student Sky Johnston, of the UC San Diego History Department. The exhibit was mounted to coincide with an international symposium on “Germans in the Pacific World from the Late 17th to 20th Century,” which examined knowledge transfer from the early modern period through the 19th and 20th centuries.

Materials in the exhibit include early depictions and descriptions of California’s people, landscape, mineral riches, and animals, ranging from the first European map of the California peninsula produced in 1702, to the large atlas issued to accompany the Voyage de Humboldt et Bonpland, led by the famous German explorer, Alexander v. Humboldt.

Also included are texts and images associated with 19th and 20th century German travelers, colonialism, and racial science, as well as a volume on birds of California and the Sandwich Islands, the name given by Captain James Cook to the Hawaiian Islands. The book depicts the majestic white Pelican and other Pacific birds, which caught the attention of German zoologists and explorers.

California drew many German immigrants to its coast during and long after the Gold Rush. One such man, Paul Alexander, recounted his experiences and offered his views on California and its peoples in print. This volume of helpful information for prospective travelers and immigrants appeared in a series of handbooks pitched to Germans for one mark per volume. Earlier volumes included guides to Wisconsin, Argentina, and Canada, and an introduction to the English language. The Pacific coast was the new frontier. Accordingly, Alexander’s account of California was followed with a book on Oregon. As seen here, the volume was small enough for a traveler to carry on his person.